Are all other horrors of war so eclipsed by the Holocaust that we no longer have any usable scale by which we can condemn them? Can we condemn them as much as they ought (in my view) to be condemned without being falsely accused of equating them with the Holocaust?

Here is one answer. In his fine and necessary book ‘Orderly and Humane’ (about the disorderly and inhumane, but forgotten and ignored expulsions of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe after 1945) Professor R.M. Douglas wrote (referring to these expulsions) : ‘…the threshold for acknowledging mass human rights abuses for what they are cannot be the unprecedented barbarities of the Hitler regime. With the exception of the war years themselves, Europe West of the USSR had never seen, nor would it again see, so vast a complex of arbitrary detention - one in which tens of thousands, including many children, would lose their lives. That it largely escaped the attention of contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, and the notice of historians today, is a chilling commentary on the ease with which great evils in plain sight may go overlooked when they present a spectacle that international public opinion prefers not to see.’

Does the fact that Hitler’s Germany was responsible for the Holocaust mean that any measures taken against Germany during the 1939-45 war, or afterwards, are beyond effective condemnation? Does this fact mean that anyone who does condemn such measures is in effect excusing or minimising the Holocaust? Some have, repellently, tried to do so, attempting to equate them.

Does that mean that those (such as I) who emphatically do not equate them but who still regard the bombing of civilians as terrible and wrong, must fall silent for fear of being falsely lumped with such grisly propagandists?

My answer is ‘no’. It is perfectly possible to make a consistent and sincere condemnation of both the Holocaust and the British bombing of German civilians. It is perfectly possible to say that the bombing was wrong, while continuing to believe that the Holocaust was even more wrong, and rejecting any equivalence of the two.

The problem really lies in the ear of the hearer of such condemnations. A lot of British people do not want to know what we did in our bombing of Germany, and as a result remain in a deep and self-imposed ignorance. That ignorance allows them to remain ignorant of the he extent of the bombing (thinking that Dresden was the only serious incident for instance) .they are also uninformed about its true character, continuing to think that our main targets were military and industrial, rather than domestic. Knowing so little of its true character, they can then pretend to themselves that nothing truly bad was done, and even it was, that the mass murder of the Jews somehow excused it. If these barriers fail, they can claim that critics of the bombing are German propagandists trying to excuse the Holocaust. Or they can say that people such as I are attacking the RAF bomber crews, which I specifically refuse to do.

As I know to my cost, from various futile exchanges I have had with people who refuse to listen to facts and logic about the British bombing, many even to this day simply do not want to know what happened in the Dead Cities of Germany, many have a deluded belief that the civilian casualties were an unintended side effect of striking at military targets, many believe (wrongly) that the bombing of German cities in some way ‘saved’ Britain from invasion ( a danger which, if it ever existed, was in no way reduced by bombing) or contributed importantly to winning the war (which they did not, in reality do, as Hitler had already lost the war in the USSR before the major bombing started) .

It is arguable that they may have shortened the war by diverting aircraft and artillery from the Russian front, but it is equally arguable that they may have lengthened it, by depriving our anti-submarine forces of aircraft, and by diverting men and manpower to the destruction of cities and people, who could have been better used in attacking military and industrial targets.

Had they done so, of course, they would have achieved a similar diversion of artillery and aircraft from the eastern front. This rapidly becomes counterfactual and speculative, as it involves such things as the earlier development of long-range fighter escorts, consideration. But in truth it is a diversion from the moral argument – could it ever possibly be right to deliberately bomb civilians from the air?

One solution to this is to apply a presumption of mass guilt to the German people. They must have known, we are told, what was being done by Hitler. I cannot tell if this is so. The industrial mass-murder of Jews took place outside Germany, and it was never publicly stated as an aim. Yet rumours must have reached civilians from the combat zones and the districts in conquered territory where the murders were taking place. I think many knew, and many did not, and many suspected. The outrage of Kristallnacht in 1938 must have warned anyone in any doubt that the National Socialists were ready and willing to murder Jews for being Jews. Whether you could deduce the existence of Auschwitz from that , I am not so sure. The human mind would be inclined to think it impossible, unless presented with actual evidence.

As we know, certain people, either pitiable or disgusting, refuse to this day to believe the extermination camps existed, in spite of incontrovertible evidence and eyewitness testimony.

But I think we must exclude babies and children from this calculation. Yet they were not excluded from the bombing.

Then there is the question of whether they could have done anything about it. Once again, they could have done so. But how many of those who say ‘They should have protested’ would have done so themselves in that society? The threat of losing a job is usually enough to silence most forms of dissent in modern Britain. How much more effective would be the threat of torture, imprisonment and death, made against you and your family?

As I repeatedly point out, many Germans continued to resist, and to vote against Hitler long after most of us would have gone quiet, when the Brownshirt terror was already unleashed.. The English channel , which saved us form these dilemmas, is not a moral quality allowing us to claim superiority. It is just a physical fact, which saved us from being tested.

Maybe you think that failing to protest, even in such danger, is a sin of omission so serious that those who committed it, and their children, deserved to die in firestorms.

Well, that is a point of view, But those who believe it must be careful to apply the same stringency to themselves, and to their own acts of cowardice, probably known only to themselves.

We know for certain from the dispassionate official post-war bombing surveys that the effects on the German economy were far smaller than those imagined and claimed by the advocates of ‘dehousing’.

AS for ‘giving them some of their own medicine’, we also know that the British raids on Germany were far larger than those by Germany on Britain (Germany never had any equivalent of the Lancaster bomber) , and that wartime surveys showed that people who had experienced German bombing were *less* keen on bombing Germany in return than those who had not experienced it. The question of ‘who started it’ is also a good deal more complicated than we like to think. AS for the argument that ‘you weren’t there, you couldn’t know’, Bishop George Bell of Chichester (an unimpeachable patriot, by no means a pacifist and an early and principled opponent of the Nazis well-informed about events inside Germany) was ‘there’, experienced bombing himself and still opposed it. Indeed, he and those like him were in a minority, but the fact that he did and said what he did and said, shows that it was possible be ‘there’ and oppose it.

I often think that the expression ‘War Crime’ gets in the way of our understanding. If you don’t want to lose a war you must fight with ruthless violence. Almost every effective act of war ( I say ‘almost’, in case there are exceptions I can’t think of) would be a crime in civilian life. The only excuse is self-defence or justice, and – if we knew how terrible war was going to be – most of us would set the bar of justice a good deal higher than we do. I’m still not a pacifist – I tried that in my teens and found it impossible to sustain. But I am harder and harder to persuade of the need for war except in direct self-defence . Well-prepared and thoughtful deterrence, on the other hand, is a moral act of great value.

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Excellent piece, Pete! This is a must-read for any Daily Mail reader out there.
What disgusts me about some parts of the Daily Mail (and Breitbart London) is how some* of its readers seem to lack a sense of forgiveness, instead showing mad, revengeful spite. This is one of the damaging effects atheism has on Western society.

Had Sir Patrick Moore lived to read this article, he'd immediately change his tune. Some years ago (2013?) an article here at the DM reported his deep hatred of modern Germans. I can understand how he started hating Germans in the first place (his fiancée got killed by Nazi bombs), but what I can't understand is how he, a famous scientist, could wish death upon modern generations who had no direct involvement in their ancestors' crimes, especially since millions of other Britons of his generation managed to get over their losses and start anew. Had he stopped living in the past and moved on, he would've probably lived longer (they say hanging on to old grudges gets you nowhere).
Pat also ignored the fact that many innocents in Germany lost their lives to Allied bombing (as you state in your column) aside from the brutality of the Third Reich. His statement put a salt in the wound; chances are, there might've been a German guy/gal of his generation who lost a loved one to Allied bombing and, had he/she not let bygones be bygones, would've said the same thing about Americans/Britons. Two wrongs don't make a right.

P.S. Racism is wrong no matter who it's coming from. Some of the DM readers ignore the fact that the original Anglo-Saxons came from Germany and that a large number of Americans are of German descent. Those readers sometimes blame any sociopolitical ills on genes. Excuse me, but isn't their logic the same sort the Nazis used to justify killing the Jews?

P.P.S. The fact that Marx was German doesn't change the fact that Darwin was British and the eugenics movement more or less originated in America. Each society has good and bad people.

Peter Preston - you speak of the principles of Christianity and that it "teaches believers to pray for their enemies", adding, in my opinion quite rightly:

"While there is life, we are told, there is hope. So while a person is still alive alive, he or she can presumably change his or her errant ways."

If you really mean that, you must surely condemn the barbaric practice of capital punishment. After all, to kill a person means there is no more life and consequently no more hope - and no more chnace for a sinner to change his or her errant ways.

(I don't wish to start a general discussion on the death penalty, but I would be interested to hear whether you agree or not.)

Contributor Mike B, writing about some attitude or other which he seems to attribute to the Vatican authorities in office during World War 2, wrote:

"........which makes its instruction to the German Catholic Church to pray for Hitler inexcusable."

I have no idea - and at this distance in time care less - whether any such instruction was given, as you say, to Geman Catholic folk but what you write here, sir, would seem to suggest little knowledge of the principles of Christianity, principles admittedly difficult to embrace but principles none the less.
I may not be too bright but I don't see what can be wrong in sincerely praying for anyone. Perhaps you would care to explain where the fault in such prayer may lie, sir.
While there is life, we are told, there is hope. So while a person is still alive alive, he or she can presumably change his or her errant ways. That is what I at any rate am relying on.
Christianity even teaches believers to pray for their enemies, an injunction which, I think, is never going to be popular or to lend itself to rhetoric.
The world has no need of a religion that is right when the world itself is right; what it needs - and in Christianity, it seems to me, has - is a religion that is right when the world and its ways are wrong, however unpopular or unfashionable such a religion may be.

Every act of violence is accompanied by a degree of collateral damage.
The collateral damage from the last century's holocaust has tumbled down the ages of yesterday to today and will rumble on to tomorrow, not only in the void of lost generations, but also in the firm and unyielding control that its survivors have secured in their efforts to ensure their safe survival in what they perceive to be a totally hostile world.
The subsequent problems that such collateral damage inflicts upon that 'hostile world' remainder, much of which was never participatory in the initial violence of the holocaust, has evidently subjected those innocent peoples and nations to undeserved laws and controls of their lives and freedoms, particularly of free speech and especially of rights to scrutinise or criticise the actions of those survivors.
Out of such, I believe, comes the 'anti-Semitism' we all witness and deplore day by day.
Only when this ongoing 'collateral damage' is addressed will we see the beginning of the end of these problems.

My father,who was interested in the history of the Second World War, read a book on Dresden which said that Churchill personally authorised the Dresden raid to prove to Russia that in the event of a dispute the UK meant business. Whether it demonstrated that is arguable. However I would argue that Churchill let Harris personally down who carried out the bombing he was asked. In the programmes "the Nazis, a warning from history", it is shown that the German civilian population was concerned about stories about the holocaust in the East sufficient for the Gestapo to flag these concerns up to higher authority when they became aware of these concerns.

Of course, churches in Allied countries prayed for their leaders. However, the Vatican's official position was one of neutrality and, by virtue of the Lateran Treaty, it was sovereign and not part of the Italian Fascist state, which makes its instruction to the German Catholic Church to pray for Hitler inexcusable.

The Dresden bombing was not an isolated incident. I came across the following paragraph when looking at the Wikipedia entry for Heilbronn, a medium-sized town in SW German, for another reason:
"The catastrophe for Heilbronn was the bombing raid on December 4, 1944. During that raid the city centre was completely destroyed and the surrounding boroughs heavily damaged. Within one half hour 6,500 residents perished, most incinerated beyond recognition. Of those, 5,000 were later buried in mass graves in the Ehrenfriedhof (cemetery of honour) in the valley of the Köpfer creek close to the city. A memorial continues to be held annually in memory of those that died that day. As a result of the war Heilbronn's population shrank to 46,350."

Bombing, wherever it occurs, including of ISIL-held territories in the Levant, results in widespread civilian casualties and is a clear act of terrorism. It is worse than attacks by militants on carefully selected targets for which most of the population has little sympathy, as happened yesterday in Kobenhavn. It is ironic that the population of this city took effective steps to save most of its Jewish inhabitants in 1943, but they are now a hated minority there.

Dresden was not the only futile air raid in February 1945. Albert Speer had told Hitler on 30th January that, afar the loss of the Silesia industrial area, the war was undeniably lost.
On 23rd February the town of Pforzheim in the Black Forest was devastated in a 500 bomber raid. It is much smaller than Dresden (about the size of Oxford), so the concentration of destruction beggared belief. In terms of the percentage of the population killed in one raid, it was the third worst air raid in history after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 19,000 were killed out a population of 80,000.
And the reason for the attack? Because the town had been famous for jewellery and watch production, Intelligence surmised that these precision skills might have been diverted to military production such as fuses. You are reminded of the old jibe that military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
The rebuilt city, which is mostly in an unremarkable 1950s style, contains few direct memorials to the catastrophe. The square beside the Town Hall is named "Platz des 23. Februar 1945", but the only description of what happened on that date is engraved on a metal plate, the size of a postcard, attached below the street sign. Even the huge cross on the mass grave in the cemetery bears only the date, with no description of the event.

"I find it quite interesting that you should invoke the Roman Catholic Catechism's anti-war stance. That didn't prevent the Vatican ordering prayers to be said from German pulpits, for Hitler (a man, I think it fair to say, who didn't go out of his way to avoid war) every year, on his birthday, right up until the end of WWII."

Do you sincerely believe that the churches of the allied nations--including the Catholic Church--behaved any differently? During war, it is quite normal for churches to pray for victory for their side and to pray for the health of their leaders, even if they happen to fighting their own co-religionists. Abraham Lincoln remarked on this tendency long ago:

"Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes." (Second Inaugural Address, 1865)

My contribution to this debate is not to take issue with Mr Hitchens or his critics, but simply to remind readers that episodes like that of Dresden were taking place at the same time on the opposite side of the world in the American bombing offensive against Japan. Everyone knows about the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but not the "conventional" bombing which preceded them. Take the case of the Tokyo fire raid, with its use of incendiaries, on the night of 9/10 March 1945. In his book, "Blankets of Fire", Kenneth Werrell writes: "The impact of the mission on Japan's largest and most important city was devastating. The bombing and fire destroyed almost 16 square miles...which was approximately 8 percent of the urban area, and included one-quarter of the buildings in the city...Casualty figures are inexact, as might be expected in such a mammoth event, ranging from about 80,000 to 100,000 killed. Surely the Tokyo fire raid is one of the deadliest air raids of all time, surpassing Hamburg, Dresden and Nagasaki, and on the scale of Hiroshima, and is certainly one of the most destructive."

And your comments on the Royal Navy's policy of starvation blockade in WW2, despite the knowledge that it killed up to 900,000 German and Austro-Hungarian civilians in WW1? Germany countered the blockade by sequestering foodstuffs from occupied countries in order to keep itself well fed. Greece suffered such starvation that Oxfam was founded in 1942 to alleviate its suffering. And of course the Royal Navy's pre-war policy of building big battleships with inadequate tropical cooling (so defending Singapore was always unfeasible) for showing the flag instead of enough small anti-submarine vessels condemned 50,000 civilian Merchant Navy sailors to death at the hands of a fleet of U-Boats that numbered no more than thirty at sea at the start of the war.

I think Richard Smiths posting was interesting. I am sixty years old and for most of my life I believed the bombing was right because it shortened the war. And... didn't they deserve it? I was told stories by my Father who described the bodies laid out in the street in Plymouth after the raids. Her house was destroyed in the bombing on two occasions. Over the last few years my view has changed and I now think we were probably wrong. But perhaps Richard Smith on this blog is correct. It was necessary for the German people to see their world utterly destroyed in order that they understood that they had lost. And that included their cities in rubble. There was also a view soon after the war, which is now no longer even contemplated, that the correct outcome was Germany's partition. I don't think I am favour of this, but who knows what the future holds. Germany is a heavy weight and when it throws it's weight around you'd better watch out.

John Aspinall - to be clear, is it your view that anything is acceptable and should go without punishment in war, however conducive to its military aims? Raping the women of occupied towns? Torturing POWs? If this isn't your position - and I sincerely hope it isn't - why shouldn't killing an injured enemy combatant be punished? I hope you won't think me an 'oddball' for asking.

@ Mr Bunker
As Neo Nazi nutter. for alas most that question the un truths of that particular event,must be branded by you in that way. I find it strange that a country at war and surrounded by the worlds armies, found the time to do what you correctly say ( but might be wrong ) was not an act of war.. But as most concentration camps were attached to factories. where appalling conditions at some point ,created mounds of corpses. Would be I imagine a cause for the allies to bomb these factories as legitimate targets . So a connection existed ,killing Jews was therefore unrelated to war you say. But in a way it was, for they were forced to work towards the war effort.
I agree that wars are bad ,having lived partially thru one. But trying to personalise that which is not personal, especially now. Our smart bombs are the epitome of non personal . even if the trigger man is still a human being.
And as doing as ones ordered ,which even today in armies everywhere carry harsh punishments. So should have been respected at least of the lowest ranks as a perfectly adequate defence.But was not. Is in no way a civilised conqueror would or should act.

I'll continue on this thread as I consider myself an expert ,where Hitchens is not . Lets suppose Hitler was a Jew hater, He most certainly was, although his greatest friend, and also his personal physician were Jewish. Blaming all the ills of Versailles on the Jew. So he set out to punish them.
We the allies bombed anyone, careless enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. How much more uncivilised is that . Killing those one hates against killing those one has no hatred for. in fact quite a blasé attitude in all wars to civilians . History tell s of many holocausts ,when powerful people vent their hatreds on others. Whether justified or not.
And as what we did is in my view ,is worse than the Jewish slaughtered, For we didn't do it to save a single Jew. But oh my god ,how lucky were we to have the holocaust to then excuse our actions.

I understand that "all's fair in love and war" (although I'm not sure whether I agree or not!). But I must point out that the holocausst was not something "in war". Admittedly it did take place whilst Germany was at war but it was not part of the "war effort", so to speak. Instead itwas the deliberately planned and executed, intended genocide of the Jews in Europe. As such it was a cold-blooded action of unparalleled barbarity that cannot be compared with either Dresden or Hiroshima.

The generally accepted view in Germany today, with the exception of a few neo-Nazi nutters, is that it was an act of such singularity that it ought not to be compared to any "war"-crime. Those alive in Germany today had nothing to do with it personally, but a sense of shame - not of personal guilt - is still alive today. And that is good so. The holocaust is not, and never should be, forgotten.

The point Richard Smith makes is not new and there is much to be said for it. I also agree with Mr Hitchens on the question of the sense (or lack of it) of the area bombing. Bomber command could have been used differently and with more effect to shorten the war.

Just to put the record straight: The latest estimates put the number of people killed in Dresden at around 25 000 - not by any means 400 000. - And although America may not have wanted to declare war on Germany, unfortunately Hitler declared war on the USA.

"If you don’t want to lose a war you must fight with ruthless violence. Almost every effective act of war ( I say ‘almost’, in case there are exceptions I can’t think of) would be a crime in civilian life."

Too true.

As I argued here last year with one or two oddballs: this is why Alexander Blackman should not have been charged with murder.

Alexander Blackman is in prison to keep a delusion intact. His incarceration is one of the scandals of our time.

I find it quite interesting that you should invoke the Roman Catholic Catechism's anti-war stance. That didn't prevent the Vatican ordering prayers to be said from German pulpits, for Hitler (a man, I think it fair to say, who didn't go out of his way to avoid war) every year, on his birthday, right up until the end of WWII.

Clarification to my comment at 12:18; I referred to Peter Hitchens' last two posts thinking that this one, and the one entitled "A Plea for Considered Coverage, lest Fear and Panic Drive us into the Pit of War" were sequential - but there is an intervening one about funding to political parties that seemed to escape my notice.

I am a loyal English patriot and would fight to the death to defend England. But I have vehemently opposed every foreign warlike adventure of the last twenty years that the British government has carried out in my name in a host of countries from Bosnia to Libya and now about to be Ukraine.

Assuming that any of these countries (Russia does and it remains to be seen where that will lead) whose people we have murdered and lands despoiled had the power to retaliate with mass aerial bombing of Britain would I deserve to die simply because I was English and happened to live here under a dreadful government?

This first-hand account should be read by all who don't know about the event. One would very much like to meet the author, Mr Gregg. Mr Hitchens is surely right that we should be able to evaluate the morailty of that bombing campaign without having to compare it with The Holocaust. He also needs to keep a sense of proportion - I imagine he does.

I always understood that the main reason for bombing Dresden was to shorten the war by breaking the German morale. The German front in the WWI, after all, distintigrated mainly due to affairs at home; ditto Vietnam many years later. Apparantly it didn't work with the Third Reich, as - as the author poignantly describes - the Gemans methodically repaired their losses and carried on. I always thought that this worthwhile aim made the bombing raid valid; now I'm not so sure, though the lack of alternatives at the time surely played a big factor.

Living in "Siebenbürgen" (Transylvania) I should probably read Prof Douglas's book about the 'forgotten and ignored' expulsions of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe after 1945. Statistics apparantly put the figure at about 75,000. A year earlier, with Romania now loyal to the Allies and the USSR, the latter saw fit to transport 130,000 Romanian soldiers to their camps, where naturally many perished. 'Forgotten and ignored' generally goes much wider and deeper, so lets not necessarily get hung up over special interest groups championed by academics.

I meet many people here who are pro-Nazi - usually, though not always, keeping quite about it - some of whom give Dresden as an example that the Allies were themselves no better. Apparantly 25,000 were killed in the raid. Going forward, it's important to keep a sense of proportion and not give such people a sense of righteousness. Seriously.

For me, perhaps, the only good thing to come from destroying Dresden and it's people is that it lessens the grief of watching the decline of my country: a nation responsible for a crime such as this does not deserve to prosper.

He gives an account of a Jewish Professor who was kicked in the streets of Dresden because he was wearing a yellow star.

The people of Dresden helped elect Hitler. Germany was neutralised as a military force with expansionist tendencies until 1991. She still hasn't recovered her fighting spirit - thank goodness.

11 million people killed in death camps compared to 25,000 killed at a strategic rail intersection for troops and military hardware. This was total war as we have never experienced it and Germany was still bombing mainland Britain with rockets at the time.

If this action saved 10 allied troop's or one London school child's lives by bringing the end of the war a few days closer...

***PH writes. I too have read Professor Klemperer's memoir (everyone should) , and what is clear from it is that, while there were many disgusting episodes of hatred against Jews, he also experienced many acts of kindness and encouragement from individual Germans. Perhaps the most heroic of all was his non-Jewish wife Eva, who - though often ill - shared his privations and humiliations, yet resisted relentless pressure to divorce him (had she done so, he would undoubtedly have been murdered soon afterwards) . It seems to me that it is hard to justify the collective mass execution of thousands of people because of the crimes of some of them.

Some of the people of Dresden helped to elect Hitler. Many of them did not, and continued to vote against him and his party long after it was dangerous to do this. I think Mr Peat';s departure from the normal rules of civilized behaviour is a defensive mechanism. He (like most British patriots) is reluctant to acknowledge that we did wrong. So was I, for many years. But there is some serenity to be found in changing your mind on this.

As I specifically explained that there is not and cannot be any equation between the Holocaust and our bombing of civilians, and that i am am specifically not kaing one, the comparison between the deaths of 25,000 largely defenceless civilians in Dresden and the Holocaust adds nothing to the argument. the action must be judged on its own. I can only imagine Mr Peat has reached for this non-argument to muddy the waters. In fact, the total number of persons killed by Allied air raids in Germany was 350,000 (the generally agreed estimate) and Dresden was only a small part of this, though it is the only part most people in Britain have heard of.

The railway junction argument is a bit thin. Incendiary bombs, dropped on residential areas, are not especially effective at destroying railway lines( which, as Britain's railways many times proved, can be repaired quite swiftly after bombing raids) . Germany had already lost the war by February 1945. Mr Peat must surely ask himself if the Dresden raid really made any substantial difference to the outcome.

Peter,There's an interesting article by Dominic sellwood in the telegraph about this subject,many of the comments underneath show the ignorance you allude to.
I'm no less a patriot for considering civilian bombing as a war crime.

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